Tag: Summer planning

As preparation for the special effects in the film, I purchased and tested the latex techniques. Using the latex and an iPad and a stand, I put together a video presenting how I was going to go about creating the effects. I posted the video on YouTube and here is the result:

I knew that we were going to need to have seeds floating on the surface of the bath in our video, and therefore, I took it upon myself to test if this would work. I bought some regular sesame seeds and floated these on top of water to test if they would stay up or eventually sink. The test was successful, and the seeds floated on the top. However, this was only the majority, as the ones that got wet on both sides, sank down to the bottom.

During one of our media lessons, the issue was raised that regular sesame seeds are a very pale beige. This would make them less visible when placed against skin in order to make the embedded effect. To resolve this problem I tried dyeing the seeds using dark food colouring to make them more visible. However, the addition of the food colouring made the seeds more dense and as a result, most of the seeds sank to the bottom. As well as this,
the dye ran off straight away.

Another aspect that I had to explore was how to ensure that all of the seeds wouldn’t sink down the drain after usage. The best way to resolve this, I found, was the place a cloth over the sink hole, and let the seeds gather as the water filtered through the thin material.

In order to film, we had to email the teacher to book the equipment for the weekend that we wanted. As we had already envisaged the idea for the film, established a location and actors, and had drawn up some story boards, we decided to film it as soon as we possibly could. Chloe emailed asking for the equipment for the weekend of the 25th and the 26th of June. However, our actor Maddy was working on the Sunday, and so we could not film on both days.

This task took the least time because we didn’t think about it that much. Hopefully, it won’t come back to haunt us later on, and we will have the equipment for as long as we need.

We decided to film the project in Lisha’s bathroom. This is because Lisha’s bathroom is very modern, and has a black and white theme. We thought that this would reflect the status of the girl, as we wanted to portray her as being spoiled and pompous. We intend to fill the bathroom with beauty products also, to further imply the idea of her self righteousness.

We plan to adapt the rest of the film to the structure of Lisha’s house. This will be relatively easy because Lisha’s house is very modern and basic. The only areas of the house that we to use are the bathroom (for the majority), the staircase, the kitchen and the front door. Because we are only using a limited amount of areas, the location scouting has been rather easy. The only problem that we discovered with the bathroom was that the walls were tiled from half way down. As shown in the images, the tiles are black, and incredibly reflective. This is a problem for us because when filming in such a small space, it would be hard to get the camera reflection out of view of the shot.

Our first ideas were based on the place Bath, as we wanted to subvert from the expected ideas based around an actual bath. As starter research for this we looked into the history of the place. As it turned out, Bath has more history than we had expected. Here are a list of the ideas we established with the image of Bath:

In the 16th and 17th century, Bath was infected with the plague. The plague spread quickly and people were desperately trying to come up with immediate healing solutions. One of these solutions was bathing in the springs to rid yourself of the disease and cleanse your body. Inevitably, this spread the disease more than it did abolish it. From this we developed the idea that we could film a plague spreading and represent the contagion of the disease via the communal bathing: portraying the naïveté of society during that period.

During the same period, there would be designated people to the role of “scavenger” to clean the streets. This was another ‘curing’ method, because of the foul stench of the plague. We didn’t really develop this idea any further, as we had the base idea but had no story to follow it up with. This suggestion was also not very accepted by the whole group. This is because it seemed plain and eventless.

Our third idea was going to be based on when in 1642 civil war arose between the king and parliament. In 1643 Bath was occupied by parliamentary troops as they fought a battle against the royalists north of the town. The parliamentary army withdrew from the area and the royalists occupied Bath. We had the option to develop this idea into a historically accurate, parliamentary film. However, this didn’t appeal to us as we wanted something more thrilling.

Shortly after we discovered that in 1849, there was a cholera outbreak in Bath, and we had the initial idea to expand this and merge it with the very first idea, but set in a more modern time to make filming easier.

After figuring that these ideas were probably too far fetched, and difficult to make, we decided to manipulate the word ‘bath’. To do this we looked up associations and connotations with the word bath.

We came up with a short list:

Birdbath

Bloodbath

Bathrobe

Bathroom

Bathtub

Bathtowel

Bathbomb

Bubblebath

We derived ideas for the film using each of these words and by doing so, we were able to eliminate the ideas we liked the least.

As it turned out, we couldn’t come up with any good ideas that consisted of the ideas. All except for one that included the production and sales of acidic bath bombs that is the start of a series of bathtub deaths. However, we soon realised that this was cliche and creating so many different murder scenes would be far too difficult. Finally, I went home and did further research and looked at pictures of baths for inspiration. I remembered that a while back I had seen a Korean myth about a narcissistic teenage girl who hears that sesame seeds are good for exfoliation. After this discovery, she tries bathing in the seeds and the hot water of the bath opens up her pores where the seeds get stuck. After this, she frantically tries to remove the seeds, she starts to rip her skin. As a result of this, she destroys her previously-perfect image in the search for further beautification. This idea carries a moral, and is based on a real believe in a foreign county which adds value to the concept.